


and thus were swallowed by the sea

by pensee



Category: Hannibal (TV), Polar (2019)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Spies and Assassins, Bourne Identity storyline AU, CIA Agent Will, Camille’s story follows Polar except it happens at sea, Duncan has retrograde amnesia for a while, M/M, Young Camille, but Abigail lives, implied Hannigram, though Hannibal took Abigail and left
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-27
Updated: 2019-05-27
Packaged: 2020-03-19 21:56:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,872
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18979123
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pensee/pseuds/pensee
Summary: He wakes up hanging off the end of a fishing boat, a young girl suffering from hypothermia clinging to his sleeve.





	and thus were swallowed by the sea

**Author's Note:**

> Enjoy the improbabilities.

The water laps irritatingly against his ear, plunging him into an eerie quiet that is broken every few seconds as the waves recede. The repetitive motion of the tide spits him out onto the end of the dock, having swallowed him and decided it did not like the taste.

“H-hey,” a small voice chatters, complexion white as her small teeth, all the warm blood pooled at her core. “W-Wake up, wake up, asshole.”

She is speaking Tagalog, yet he understands her perfectly, though unsure of how he knows so or why.

“W-we’re going to die if you don’t wa-wake up.”

It’s not such a bad thing, he thinks. My bones are old and tired, and I don’t know you. It shouldn’t be a bad thing, to die in such a beautiful place.

Clearly, the locals have a very different opinion of things, one of them screaming to another in French and slapping him on the face to rouse him.

“Fuck,” he curses, hawks out a mouthful of seawater.

And thus, he wakes up hanging off the end of a fishing boat, a young girl suffering from hypothermia clinging to his sleeve.

 

 

“This American, he will heal you,” the fisherman says, and uses his weathered hands to push him back onto the dining table, the only thing big enough in the whole village to hold him, it seemed, most beds made to fit the tiny, stooped forms of its elderly residents.

 _In my line of work, we don’t live to be that old,_ the man thinks, but the thought floats away, quickly as it came.

“Is he a doctor?”

“No,” the fisherman scoffs. “But he has medicine. There have been no doctors here for many years.”

“You’re trusting a tourist—,” he tries to say, though the pain in his ribs is excruciating. “Trusting a tourist to help me? I have a bullet in me.”

“Oh, there is probably more than one. But they are not so serious, hm? You would not be speaking otherwise.”

Plenty of dead men walking know how to speak, he wants to say, but it will sound silly. Something a villain in a fairy tale would say to alarm the children in the audience.

“Let the American bring his medicine,” he scoffs, and the fisherman hands him a cracked mirror, the whole of its intricate frame nonetheless still outlined in real silver.

“And ask him to see about your eye.”

 

 

“Where is the girl who washed up with me?”

The American, who has been here while he slept for a whole two days—so said the fisherman—does now answer.

He waits, and the American finally sighs, “She’s resting. Ate a whole three bowls of fish stew and then passed out again, but she’s fine.”

“Do you have a daughter?” he asks. “You seemed affected, when I mentioned her.”

“No,” the American frowns, eyes clouding over. “Not anymore.”

“Did she die?” he asks.

“You shouldn’t ask so many socially unacceptable questions,” the American says, his sad blue eyes fixed on the ground. He is much younger than he first appears, now that the man can get a good look at him in the sunlight.

“You shouldn’t deny me answers, then,” he says. “What’s your name?”

“Will,” the American says, without the long pause this time. “My name’s Will.”

 _What’s_ my _name_ , the man considers asking, but the American will just think him mad.

“Do you want to see the girl?” Will asks, softly. Guiltily, even, though the man does not know what the American would have to feel guilty about. It is not as if he had anything to do with whatever happened, to have almost drowned them.

“I will see her when I am sure my wounds are not bleeding through. You wrapped these bandages too loosely,” he complains, to see what the boy will do.

“You should thank me. Be glad that old woman and I know how to sew,” he says, his eyes shining with something brighter than sadness.

 

 

“I don’t want to see you,” the girl hisses at him, when he tries to get her to eat another bowl of vegetables.

Her caretaker, an old woman wearing a headscarf, tuts at her in French, but the little girl does not—or pretends not to—understand.

“Who do you think did that to your eye?” she tells him, when he tries to fumble for her name and cannot produce it.

“My name is Camille, you bastard,” she says, “and I’m the one who did that to you!”

Her anger is explosive, but like all combustive things, its fuel eventually runs out. She studies him with a hatred he had not known was possible in someone so childish, and he deposits the bowl of untouched greens on the counter before fleeing to the porch.

His fingers itch for something, and looking down at his hands, he realizes the skin of his right is discolored, its fingertips turned yellowish. He hadn’t even known he’d smoked.

 

 

Whatever available local moonshine and beer from the mainland— _brought in by horseback_ , informs the bartender, with a smile full of broken teeth—brings him to equilibrium again, and the man squints down at a passport with his face on it but an unfamiliar name.

“My name is Pelle Rasmussen,” he says, though the syllables trip unnaturally over his tongue.

“The fisherman found that in your coat. There was nothing in the pockets of the girl’s dress,” Will tells him, his hands clasped around his own beer as if waiting for something. Praying, even.

The man—Pelle, maybe—does not know what this boy could be praying about. He is a tourist stumbled upon a bit of excitement, hasn’t he already stumbled upon the traveler’s ultimate goal?

“You heard her. She said her name is Camille.”

“I—,” Will starts, his hand moving, very slowly, from his glass, as if to reach for Pelle’s hand. But then, the sound of something breaking at the other end of the wooden shack the locals call a bar, and two fishmongers tall as the ceiling begin to toss punches at one another, an old woman from another table throwing a wooden stool at the closest one’s back.

Profanities begin to fly in French and Greek, and the echo of glass shattering follows them as the man swipes his beer off the table and leads the way out. Pollen from the choke of wild flowers around the building flows thick in the air, and the man sneezes.

Will laughs at the incongruous burst of noise, louder up close even than the raucous fighting in the bar.

“Do you want to see something?” Will asks, and the man, for reasons unknown, finds it even harder to breathe, and not entirely from the pollen in the air.

They wind drunkenly down the sloping village hills, back towards the sea, and the man tenses for a moment at the sound of water crashing against the dock. This is not what Will wants him to see, he thinks, and lets himself relax as the sun begins to sink below the waves, watches crabs and other small shelled creatures skitter towards their burrows.

Tidepools. The yellow dinghy. Camille somewhere in one of those houses. Will here.

He can remember these words, but when he thinks of what they mean to him, he draws nothing but a blank.

“Damocles,” Will says, in a whisper, closer now. His hands on the man’s shoulders. “What can you tell me about—.”

 _The sword of Damocles. You should run, you tired old fool, before they catch you_.

 _But they’ve already caught me_ , he thinks, his lips pressed to the American’s, the man’s hands tangled in his hair.

 

 

This is muscle memory, touch, feel, push, pull.

 _Sigh_.

Will is well-versed at these movements, knows just when to break and bend, when to fight back. The man remembers watching faceless backs, then, smooth skin and long hair, toneless moans that were more for his benefit than any real pleasure.

This claws at the empty place in his chest, and he mutters, “Turn over, on your back.”

Will, eyes wide, raises his knees, and the man pushes them till a vein pulses in the American’s forehead, back till they’re raised over his shoulders.

“Do you—Is this…?” he struggles, and Will touches the side of his face, pets the skin around his ruined eye.

“It is,” the American says, and takes him in.

 

 

The next morning is different.

Camille emerges from her self-imposed exile in order to attend chapel with the old woman currently looking after her. Dressed in a frock far too big, she is nonetheless cute, despite her devoted scowl.

“You come with us,” the woman says, in stilted English, and the man nods. Will is either comatose, hungover, or both, and will not miss him.

The woman prays for an hour, and the man wonders at the altar she prays to, for no deity he’s ever seen before. Camille swings her feet, shoes clacking against the floorboards, and it’s then that he realizes her necklace, glinting in the early morning light.

“My father gave this to me,” she tells him, again in Tagalog, when she sees him looking.

The old woman rises a moment later, complaining of her bad knees, and Camille holds out her hand to the woman, then to the man, who engulfs her small palm in his own after a beat of wondering whether the touch will be welcomed.

“It will be a nice day,” the woman smiles, patting them both on the back. “I need to go to market, on horse. You watch Camille.”

The man nearly snorts. How was he supposed to entertain a little girl? But then, there is another option. The American with the dead daughter will know.

 

 

“I never said my daughter was dead,” Will hisses, and though the man is not much for socializing, the way Will had talked about her, the man had been sure the girl was good as. Will looks down at his shoes, the way the man has noticed he does when he is nervous. “Her…her father took her away, many years ago. They live in Italy now. Maybe. I haven’t kept in touch.”

“Oh,” the man says, wanting to be sympathetic, but there is still the problem of the bored six-year-old in the fisherman’s living room. The small black and white tube television, with its sports programs that the old men of the village find great enthusiasm in betting on, do not interest her.

“Maybe the tidepools?” he suggests, and Will rolls his eyes. For a moment, he goes serious, and the man wonders whether he will be abruptly asked about the sword of Damocles again. The sword of Damocles is a metaphor for imminent danger, but of what? This is a quiet village. The most dangerous things here are the barracuda that roam the bay.

“That’s a good idea. I was wondering if you had two brain cells to rub together after last night,” Will says, and it occurs to the man that he is teasing, about the excessive liquor, the excessive rounds of sex, or both.

But it is not a good idea, he realizes soon after, Camille screaming and kicking as soon as they come within earshot of the docks, with their profusion of seabirds and the heavy, crisp scent of the ocean. She races back up the dirt path to the fishermen’s houses, and Will tries to grab her, but the man is the one to succeed at it, crouching down to hold her as she cries.

“Papa,” she murmurs, he shoulders shaking, and the hard metal surface of her necklace presses into his shoulder through the fabric of his shirt.

_It was nothing personal. It was a mistake._

The words are ugly and out of place, but he cannot help thinking them, a memory or two leaking through as he does.

He stops them, like a cork in a bottle, and feels Camille tremble in his arms.

_This is what I need to know. Nothing else._

In silence, what feels like a century later, she wipes her eyes, taking both their hands, and they walk together up the hill.

 

 

“Are you doing this on purpose?” Will asks, in a Paris hotel room instead of a homely fisherman’s cottage, Camille sleeping soundly in the connecting room.

“Doing _what_ on purpose? I’ve told you, I don’t know of any Damocles, any more than the myth,” he protests, and tosses the passport—Pelle Rasmussen, whoever that is—aside.

“You really don’t know who I am, do you,” Will says flatly, and it suddenly seems as if there is a solid wall between them, though all that separates them are pillows stuffed with goose-down.

“An irritating American who does not let things go,” the man says, though it is a flimsy attempt at a joke. Picking the scab will not do any good, for them, Camille, or anyone else.

“If you don’t remember, I’ll have to take Camille and go. If someone comes for her, I can’t leave her defenseless.”

“Comes for her? You mean, her parents? The same parents that nearly let her drown?”

Will looks at him, then, pity in his eyes.

“No. Not her parents. Her parents are dead, killed by the Black Kaiser.” His throat moves, and the man can hear the sound. “Killed by you.”

The man shakes his head. There’s pain there, but truth, too.

“Duncan, did you hear me—?”

“That’s not my name,” he roars. It had been a suicide mission. Blut had wanted to recoup the losses associated with paying the Kaiser’s pension, tossed him into the arms of the waiting Americans.

He glares at Will, reaching under his pillow for a weapon that’s not there.

“Were you going to kill me now, or only when I had fully remembered my crimes?”

 _Camille_ , he thinks, he has to get to her before the Americans get even further into her head.

“I was—I was supposed to recruit you, to get to Blut. Everyone knew you were his best, even if Damocles was barely a thorn in the Company’s side. But your last contracts, before Camille’s father, they pissed my handlers off, and that shitshow Blut sanctioned on the boat didn’t go as planned.”

 _Duncan, that’s your name, that’s your fucking name_ —.

The man angrily jabs a finger at his own eye.

“Did you do this?”

“No,” Will shudders. “No…She did that to you. After you shot her mother. You were…different, before you drowned. There couldn’t be any witnesses, and I didn’t get to you in time to stop it. You weren’t listening to reason, saying you were gonna jump off and drown her too, rather than come in as a Company asset.

“I think you were just feeling guilty. With the jobs we do, a lot can change in a night. I don’t think—Your dossier didn’t ever include whole families.”

“The job I _did_ ,” Duncan croaks, suddenly feeling heavy as lead, no fight in him anymore. “I was forcibly retired.”

He laughs listlessly, but it’s not as funny as it should be.

 

 

“The walls are really thin,” Camille whispers to him, on the way to breakfast. They have paused at a downstairs terrace, so Will can look at the exotic plants. This reminds him of something, Duncan knows him well enough now to tell, but he does not comment on just what. “I heard everything you two were saying last night.”

“I don’t know what to say,” Duncan says, because there is no honest way to say “I’m sorry” that will not sound patronizing.

“You weren’t the only two on Papa’s boat,” Camille says, still holding his hand. “Will walked in with someone who shot you all those times, when you said you didn’t want to go with them. A man with a scar on his face, who told me to come to him. But you grabbed me, and I took a pen and stabbed you in the eye.”

She inhales shakily, and he feels his eye twitch, tears welling up.

“The man with the scar was going to shoot you in the head, but Will killed him first. You jumped overboard with me, and the tide took us away. It was storming for a long time.”

“But he found us,” Duncan says, and it’s not an accusation so much as wonder and disbelief.

“Yeah,” Camille says. “He did.”

He stands, watching a mysteriously misty-eyed Will as he straightens his glasses, returns to the muted warmth of the hall and takes his place at Camille’s side.

Duncan does not reflect on why he miraculously knows the departure times of each red-eye flight out of De Gaulle, or how he knows that the one leaving at midnight tonight is their best chance of evading notice. Just tells himself that in order to protect this strange family they have built, the three of them will need to be on it.

“Are we ready to go?” Camille says, a hand on her hip, foot tapping testily as Will looks at them and struggles not to laugh.

“Yeah,” he says, taking Will under his arm, the other man steering Camille beneath his own. “Let’s go.”

**Author's Note:**

> Will stops to look at the terrace at the end because it reminds him of the little garden at Port Haven Psychiatric Facility when him and Hannibal visited Abigail. IDK how that would ever fit in into this universe, but I liked the imagery of it.
> 
>  
> 
> Also:
> 
> Jack: Here’s the Black Kaiser file.
> 
> Will: [Grumbling] Why do I always have to honeypot the gross old los—.
> 
> [Flips to Duncan’s picture]
> 
> Jack: Excuse me, the gross old what?
> 
> Will: [Oh no he’s hot.] Uh, uh nothing [prints out photocopy to keep under his pillow].


End file.
